The byproduct
Last year, one of our clients won a prize for digital inclusion. When the jury called them, they had trouble answering what they had done. Their answer was that they had built a website.
Marcus Lindblom
Head of Product
The client is Svenska Golfförbundet. The prize is Årets Komet 2025, awarded by Funka through the CommToAct Digital Inclusion Award. Six months earlier we had shipped the new golf.se on Strife CMS. Nothing in the project had been labelled "accessibility work." There was no audit phase, no remediation sprint, no widget bolted onto the footer. There was a website.
I keep coming back to that conversation. The team didn't know how to take credit, because they hadn't done the thing the prize was for. They had done a different thing, and the prize had arrived as a side effect.
The auditors have a point
I want to be careful here. The accessibility audit industry exists for good reasons, and I don't think those reasons are going away.
Most websites are not accessible. That's not a marketing claim. WCAG can only be tested by automation at around the thirty percent level, and the rest takes a human who knows what they're looking at. The majority of access issues are created in the design layer, long before code is written.
The people doing the auditing are mostly tired professionals doing serious work. What I'm pushing back on isn't the audit. It's the order of operations.
The pattern keeps repeating
In 2018, GDPR landed. The market answered with cookie consent platforms. The web got a little worse. Most of the banners didn't actually meet the law they were sold to satisfy, and a generation of users learned to click "accept" before reading a single sentence.
In 2024, more than a thousand companies that had installed AI-powered accessibility overlays were sued for accessibility violations. The widget became evidence of negligence, not insurance against it. In April 2025, the FTC finalised a one-million-dollar order against the largest overlay vendor for deceptive compliance claims.
Six hundred accessibility professionals have signed a public statement that overlays do not meet legal requirements and in many cases make accessibility worse.
This is the same shape every time. Regulation creates urgency. Vendors sell a bolt-on. Fundamentals stay broken. Users lose.
The European Accessibility Act is not a new situation. It's an old cycle in new packaging.
What we did instead
We built golf.se on Strife CMS from the first commit, the way we build every site.
The components are semantic by default. Buttons are buttons. Forms are forms. Headings carry hierarchy. The publishing flow itself nudges editors toward alt text, readable link copy, and structured pages. Accessibility work happens while they're writing, not at a launch review.
There was no accessibility track in the project plan, because the project plan was the accessibility track.
Six months after launch, golf.se won Årets Komet 2025. Today it sits at the top of webperf.se's ranking of Swedish sports federations, with 4.76 out of five overall and a perfect five out of five on accessibility. The category average is 4.1. The work that put them there was finished before anyone signed off on an audit.
The jury said it more clearly than I ever could:
Svenska Golfförbundet has shown over the past year that digital accessibility is more than a technology project. It is a tool for creating value, both for users and for the brand. By lifting both technical performance and the editor experience, they have climbed sharply in the rankings and become a clear example of how accessibility drives quality and progress online.
That isn't us talking. That's the jury for Årets Komet 2025, in their own words.
A quieter way to comply
The European Accessibility Act didn't make the platform accessible. The platform was already accessible. The law is asking us to use it the way it was meant to be used.
The next time someone offers you an accessibility project, it's worth asking what you're actually buying. Is it the foundations being put right, or is it a widget on the footer and an audit in a binder? One of those answers compounds. The other one shows up again in two years as an email from a lawyer.
There is a third way. It isn't faster. It isn't easier. It's the only one that doesn't end with a remediation invoice.